Social media and related technology: Drivers of change in managing the contemporary sales force

William C. Moncrief, Greg W. Marshall and John M. Rudd

Business Horizons, 2015, vol. 58, issue 1, 45-55

Abstract: The selling environment has undergone tremendous transformation over the past 2 decades. Perhaps the greatest change has centered on changes and advancements in technology. The latest dramatic change has been the rapidly increasing use of social media and other related technologies in the business-to-business realm. The sales world began the use of technology through the use of Web 1.0, which was primarily webpage oriented; now we see the world of social media as the paradigm of how firms should implement technology. Although there has been some recent emphasis on how marketing might implement social media into their strategies and how the individual salesperson might implement social media into his or her daily selling routine, no substantive discussion on how social media is affecting the role of the sales manager has appeared in the literature. This article systematically examines how social media is impacting the sales management function and, in fact, may be dramatically revolutionizing the position. To help the marketing and sales organization better understand the changing sales world, we present eight lessons that every sales manager needs to embrace.

Keywords: Social media; Sales management; Selling; Sales technology; Gamification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681314001475
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:58:y:2015:i:1:p:45-55

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2014.09.009

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().